WSJ: You Won’t Believe What’s in That Stimulus Bill

In selling the plan, President Obama has said this bill will make “dramatic investments to revive our flagging economy.” Well, you be the judge. Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There’s another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.

Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren’t likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President’s new budget director, told Congress a year ago, “even those [public works] that are ‘on the shelf’ generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy.”

Most of the rest of this project spending will go to such things as renewable energy funding ($8 billion) or mass transit ($6 billion) that have a low or negative return on investment. Most urban transit systems are so badly managed that their fares cover less than half of their costs. However, the people who operate these systems belong to public-employee unions that are campaign contributors to . . . guess which party?

If President Obama or the Democrats in Congress were really interested in getting the economy moving again they being about commonsense measures to free up capital. No amount of government spending is going to the that… Drastically reducing or suspending capital gains taxes for couple of years and cutting the corporate tax rate would have a far more dramatic and immediate effect than the Democrats so called stimulus bill.

We can’t spend are way out of a recession no amount of government bailouts or stimulus packages are going to change that, in fact they may make things worse.